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Gmail Users Get A Storage Boost [updated]
Faies writes "As reported by ZDNet: Not to be outdone by Lycos, Google just upped its 1,000 megabyte accounts to 1,000,000 MB. I just recently checked my inbox, and the number at the bottom confirms this. "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB." That's more than my hard drive...and plus, Google clearly wants to hold the title of being best, so who knows what will happen if someone else tries to compete with a terabyte." Now how much would you pay? Update: 05/19 13:34 GMT by T : Several comments to this thread indicate that the listed mailbox size limit has returned to the previous 1GB level, so this apparent change may be nothing more than the result of a misplaced decimal point.
A few people have made the comment that Google can do this because 99% of the people will only use a few MBs of storage anyway. Reasonable theory, but here's another idea -- it doesn't matter if everyone uses a massive amount of storage.
First, figure out how many people there are in the world that might potentially use Gmail. Then figure out what is the potential maximum amount of unique data each of those people could generate on a daily basis. Then determine the size of the redundant information that could pass through the Gmail servers.
Note that a huge percentage of emails and attachments are sent to multiple recipients. For each piece of email or attachment compute and store a unique hash. Each account consists of only a list of hashes and some header metadata. This redundant information will significantly reduce the total storage space.
A quick seach finds this Berkeley study that suggests that there were about 400 PB of email (unique) generated last year. Assuming that you can save 1 GB of data for the fully-loaded cost of $1 (US), storing all of the internet's annual email traffic costs $500M annually in the worst case.
The best case is significantly better than that, as you can:
a) compress text by up to 80%
b) store every mail only once
c) store every large binary only once
d) add storage as needed, not up-front
e) reduce the cost of storage over time
This is off-the-cuff, but Google is looking at maybe a $50M annual investment in storage to store all the email on the internet, even if everyone uses it. They don't even need a storage limit. Period.
For anyone interested in trying out Gmail for themselves:
Gmail Swap
Basically you post up what you're willing to trade for an account and if someone's interested you're set. Current notable items include a monkey, an iPod, cigars and many other much weirder things.
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Objects in Mirror are Losing!
I could use it. For one thing, I'm an email packrat, and only delete my yahoo mail when I'm out of space. But a 1TB account would be useful for so much more than email. I think of it as free web-based storage. If I could get my hands on a free-for-life 1TB gmail account, I would whip up some code to encrypt and store arbitrary information as gmail messages. With the privacy concerns regarding gmail, encryption would be a necessity for using gmail in this fashion. A proper interface would allow gmail to look like an encrypted, web-based file system.
Also, it appears that there is a 10MB limit per message. No problem, just treat gmail as a harddrive with variable block sizes, up to 10MB. Storing larger files would simply mean splitting the file across multiple messages.